Discourse practices and the linguistics resources of poetry

This paper examines two poems in terms of the ways each poem draws upon other discourses as resources for constituting its own textuality. The two means are antithetical and each are claimed to be symptomatic of antithetical assumptions about language, society and literature. We call these assumptions embodied by the texts the 'poetics' under which the poems were written. The two poetics contrasted in the discussion below are termed. 'the poetics of unity' and 'the poetics of heterogeneity'. The analysis of each poem, I hope, will lead to a fuller characterization of these terms.